Jensen Huang Summoned to Congress Over MegaSpeed and Chip Smuggling

Jensen Huang has been called back to Congress, and the terms have hardened. Committee chairmen Brian Mast, John Moolenaar and Rick Crawford want the Nvidia co-founder in a closed-door transcribed interview on 1 December, and they have threatened a subpoena if he does not come.

He arrives as a private citizen. Huang stepped down as Nvidia CEO after 33 years on 12 November, resigning as president, chief executive and board member with immediate effect, and CFO Colette Kress took over on an interim basis while the board looks for a permanent replacement.

The agenda is not the private life that ended his tenure. The chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence want to talk about MegaSpeed, the Singapore-registered firm at the centre of the argument over China’s access to high-performance GPUs, about AI chip smuggling, and about reports that Nvidia interfered with US export control policy and investigations. Nvidia’s B200 and B300 parts cannot legally be sold into China, which turns the MegaSpeed trail into a legal question rather than a commercial one.

“There are clear national security concerns that need to be addressed immediately.”

— Chairmen Mast, Moolenaar and Crawford

Nvidia’s general counsel Tim Teter has been given 2 December and the same format, with the same subpoena threat attached. Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler got a warmer letter: his appearance is framed as a hearing rather than an interview, and nobody is threatening to compel it.

The earlier approach was softer. A letter sent before the resignation asked Huang to propose another date if the first did not suit him, and it concentrated on Alice Huang, the former MegaSpeed managing director whom US intelligence suspects of working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Huang admitted the affair with a former Megaspeed executive in an internal memo on 8 November, after which the board opened an independent review that is still running. A second relationship, with a senior Nvidia employee, surfaced in the days that followed and ended his position at the company. The affair is what made this a front-page story, but the smuggling and export-control questions are the part I would sit down and read a transcript for.

The Senate wants its own turn, in public. Senator Tim Scott on X set a Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs hearing for 3 December covering the national security concerns raised in recent reporting, and he has also called in Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has reportedly accepted. Lutnick is Kessler’s boss, and he has drawn questions of his own over whether the department went easy on Nvidia.

Trade records cited in the MegaSpeed reporting show the firm’s Malaysian sister company buying at least $4.8 billion of equipment containing Nvidia technology between June 2024 and February 2026, and a Commerce official who visited that Malaysian data centre in late 2024 found hardware still sitting in boxes. Senator Tom Cotton asked the department to investigate MegaSpeed back in October 2025. That is the thread the December interviews are pulling on.

Nvidia has shed more than $1.7 trillion in market value since its 6 October record of about $5.78 trillion, dropping behind Apple and Microsoft, and the resignation knocked the shares down more than 13% before they recovered to close about 4% lower. Doubts about AI infrastructure spending were pulling the stock down before the scandal arrived, and the Democrats who won both chambers on 3 November are expected to push harder on data centre regulation when they take over next year. I keep waiting for the part of this story that reaches a graphics card, and it does not come.

Huang has signalled he will turn up. BBC reports that lawmakers say he has indicated he is willing to appear and answer whether national security was compromised, which removes the subpoena question before it is tested. Donald Trump, who handed Huang the National Medal of Science in October, was asked about the resignation on a radio show.

“That’s so sad to see that happen.”

— Donald Trump

Beijing has called the espionage allegations a smear and warned Washington against using them as a reason to tighten technology sales to China. Nvidia denied the substance of the reporting when it first ran, saying its chief executive met thousands of customer executives a year without touching trade secrets or national security material, and the board has said it has no reason to believe anything was compromised.

What none of this settles is whether Alice Huang ever worked for Chinese intelligence or saw anything sensitive. I would rather the committees come out of December with an answer on where the B200s went than with a better-sourced account of who slept with whom.

The three dates are 1, 2, and 3 December. The board’s own investigation into the national security question has not been reported yet.